Printing with Cardboard Shape Tubes

Make your own shape printers using folded cardboard tubes, for easy grip and playful maths learning for toddlers and preschoolers! The resulting art work also looks lovely when turned into wrapping paper, wall art or cut to make further collage pictures.

This activity is part of our new Toddler Play series, which celebrates simple and engaging play-times for 18 months to 3+ year olds. For this activity we combined art, motor skills and learning shapes with these super-easy DIY shape printers made from cardboard tubes!

I simply cut down a wrapping paper cardboard tube into similar length portions and then carefully bent and folded each one to represent 6 different shapes; circle, square, rectangle, triangle , heart and star. The star was quite tricky and lost its shape the fastest, but they still managed to create some lovely prints with it first.

Then we added 6 different colours of paint to a large, silicone baking sheet (one of my favourite ways to present little ones with paint as it’s so easy to clean afterwards!) and dipped one shape into each colour. I laid out large pieces of A3 white paper and let them experiment with the prints that they could create. Long tubes like this make great print-making devices as they are easy for little hands to grip and don’t slide around in the paint like flat printing materials are prone to do (which cause lots of frustration.)

It’s good for simple problem solving skills too, such as “which part of this needs to be pressed onto the paper to make the shape appear?” , “what if I push it on sideways, what will happen?” , “can I do two at once? yes!”

Printing with two hands simultaneously is great for cross-lateral connections, a very important part of development in early childhood.

Both Pop and Bean loved this simple activity and I loved watching how differently they approached it. Bean was experimental and loved layering and overlapping the shapes that she made, eventually fetching herself a paintbrush and painting inside some shapes and over the paper too. Pop meticulously covered the whole paper, making sure to use each shape and trying not to let any overlap. She named the shapes as she printed them and we talked abut the ones she didn’t know the names of and what they all looked like, using simple descriptive language e.g. round, straight, corners and edges. Bean pointed at all the stars and sang Twinkle Twinkle, her favourite song!

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